Woodsburner (7 page)

What lesson then, Henry asks himself, is his current experience awakening? He knew when he struck the match that there had been no rain for weeks. He knew the wind was strong, the grass dry, the woods asleep. These are not bits of innate wisdom; these are not universal truths that transcend experience; these are the lessons that one pieces together from living. To not know them is not to be guilty or reprehensible, only ignorant. But at what point does ignorance become
culpable?
A man so inclined might avoid experience entirely, he thinks, might leave his society behind and live alone in nature, thereby preserving the animal innocence that any act of knowing dispels. But are there not times when it would be inexcusable
not
to know?

These thoughts are not helpful to Henry at present. He keeps running, imagining that he can feel the heat of the fire at his back. He looks over his shoulder and the smoke is no longer visible, but he can smell it; he carries it with him. He is an able wanderer, a vigorous walker, but not at all adept at running great distances. His lungs protest, but he ignores their viscous whimper, forces his legs to rise and fall. He runs through tangled underbrush, through
dried snarls of huckleberries, blackberries, barberries. Earlier that morning, in a marshy recess near the river, he and Edward found skunk cabbages already in bloom
—Symplocarpus foetidus—
and he now thinks he sees a cluster of mayflowers, but he dares not pause to confirm whether he has indeed spotted the first
Epigaea repens
of the year. He can identify by name every plant and vine and withered berry that he crushes in his panicked stride, and he recalls the classifications he learned in natural history from Harvard's librarian, Thaddeus William Harris, a man from whom he would have liked to learn more about the emerging science of entomology, if only that he might be able to curse with accuracy the nagging insects flitting about his eyes and sticking to the sweat on the back of his neck.

His legs grow tired, and he feels heavy breaths scraping the bottom of his lungs, dredging up a coppery paste. He contracted a sickness nine years earlier, and as a result his lungs are often feeble things, unwilling to tolerate the exertions he demands of them. They are the reluctant engines of his excursions, sometimes weighing on him like stowaways. He has to pamper them during the days of cold and damp, but not today. He imagines his chest is made of tempered steel. He forces himself to run faster than he feels capable of running, through thickening woods, past budding oaks and birches and white pines, past alders and maples—two more miles to town, by his estimate. In all likelihood, Edward will reach it first by boat, but there is still a chance that Henry will find help along the way, someone who might sound an alarm or carry word ahead of him by faster means.

On his left, the woods begin to thin, then open onto a cleared field, and Henry sees a man behind a pair of oxen, plowing his dry fields. The man pauses and watches him stumble through the undergrowth. Henry waves his arms above his head as if he were drowning. Urgency does not permit him to consider his appearance.

“Help! Fire!”

That is what Henry yells, but the words come out thin and damp, with hardly a breath to ride on; they sound more like coughs than discernible bits of language. The farmer does not leave his oxen; he is not interested enough to come nearer, but curiosity keeps him from plowing on. He waits for Henry to trip out of the tangled brambles and half run, half hobble up to him, pausing every few steps to catch his breath.

“There … is … a… fire …”

The farmer looks at Henry's head as if it were a tree stump to be cleared from the land.

“You are trespassing, sir,” the farmer says, casting his eyes possessively over the woods abutting his field. Henry follows the farmers eyes, knows that the man must be able to see the smoke behind him. With each passing moment, the fire claims another tree, and Henry cannot fathom why the man is so slow to offer aid.

“Please.” Henry can hardly breathe. He sees brilliant flashes of color at the corners of his eyes and is afraid that he might faint. “It is moving … rapidly. I require your assistance … at once.”

The farmer makes a show of squinting, as if he were trying to decipher a message scrawled above the horizon. He removes his straw hat, the wide brim frayed like a collection of loose match-sticks, scratches at his long gray muttonchops, then draws a line through the air with hat and hand.

“The land from there to there belongs to me. My trees, my property.”

Not quite understanding, still dizzied from his exertions, Henry points to the faint wisp of smoke beyond the invisible boundary.

“The … woods … are
… burning
.”

“I see no fire in
my
woods,” the man says sharply. “Whatever lies beyond is not mine.”

Henry is dumbfounded by the absurd possibility that the man
will leave him without promising aid. He feels he can run no farther; his lungs will not tolerate it. He waves his arms weakly and stomps the ground with tired feet, trying to circulate some life back into them. He can hear the regret in his own voice and wishes he did not sound so like a child.

“I have set a fire, sir… and it is spreading. I must have your help.”

The frayed hat returns to the farmer's head. He grabs the reins decisively and barks something to the oxen, which resume pulling the plow's heavy blade through the baked soil.

“Your fire is none of my stuff,” the farmer says. “Please keep it, and yourself, off my property.”

Henry's fear is realized then. He can think of nothing he might say to convince this man of the dire threat looming in the woods. What this man cannot claim as his own, he appears content to disregard. The farmer turns and, without so much as a glance at the darkening plume, resumes his work. Henry is astonished. He had not thought he would encounter indifference, had not considered that he might have difficulty finding help. When these woods are lost, Henry thinks, the loss will be felt by all, not just by the man who wields ownership of the land.

Back through the woods, Henry must keep running, heavy legs swinging like upright scissors, cutting half successfully through knotted vegetation and dried effigies from the last season: calyx, flagroot, thoroughwort, cinquefoil, tower mustard, nightshade. A few months hence, he would normally expect to see a profusion of trumpetweed, honeysuckle, Virginian Rhexia, drooping Neottia, and the bright yellow button buds of tansy, but he doubts that the charred earth behind him will adorn itself with such a display this summer. Even now, the hopeful roots and seedlings of summer's fruit lie curled expectantly beneath the cold soil, unaware of their dismal future. Henry trips, falls, scrapes his
knees through the coarse fabric of his pants, and is up again and running. He does not stop, though it strikes him as useless, this desperate flight. With each step, the fire claims another inch of woods. Henry can do nothing to halt its progress as he runs toward uncertain aid. And what is to keep him from walking away? The fire cannot touch him where he is now. Nothing prevents him from disavowing knowledge of the fire and its origin. He and Edward could have entered into such an agreement and then set out in different directions, feigning ignorance, keeping their agency to themselves, leaving their reputations unscathed.

He cannot help but wonder how he came so suddenly to be in this predicament, after such a peaceful morning. If he were to stop running and stand still in this quiet part of the Concord Woods, there would seem to be no cause for concern. As long as he tells no one, the tragedy seems as yet not quite real. Then he thinks of Edward, paddling with the current, carrying the news to an unsuspecting audience. The fire exists only for the two of them, for now. How many people, Henry wonders, must recognize a thing for it to be real?

They will say that only a fool would have struck a match on a day such as today. An accusation to which one might retort that only a fool would consent to give a match to a man who announced the intention to use it on a day such as today, and yet they had found just such a man. Strange fortune. Henry and Edward possessed no match when they started. At the day's beginning, they had no means to cause this tragedy. The insignificant events that occurred to make the fire possible were few compared with the multitude of conditions that might have prevented it. What if the shoemaker they happened upon near the river had not possessed a match? What if he had been unwilling to give them one? What if the matches had been damp? What if it had rained? What if Henry had simply told Edward that he did not
have a taste for fish chowder? How rapidly the unplanned cause produces the unexpected effect. It takes only a moment to reverse all the moments that have come before.

Just a day earlier, Henry felt certain that he had arrived at the solution to his lifelong indecision. Should he teach, or farm, or write, or take up a trade? Should he be an observer of men, a philosopher, a chronicler of the world in which so many live and that so many ignore? Should he build things? The young country needs homes and roads and bridges and machines of all sorts in order to advance and improve men's lives. Henry's untested skills are many and they vie for his attention, but, only yesterday, he believed that he had at last conquered their dissidence, and he thought the occasion a fit cause for taking a holiday on the river. The result is not what he envisioned, but his determination is unchanged. When he returns home from this misadventure, he thinks, he will solidify his new commitment in the journal that he began seven years earlier. He composes the new entry in his head as he runs. He will write this down to ensure that he does not drift from his true purpose:

It was Edward who had insisted on a fish chowder, and Henry might have refused, argued against it. But he did not, so he cannot disburden himself of the responsibility. He cannot wriggle free from the logic that has clamped shut upon some guilty lobe of his brain. Every second of every day, a man is the sum effect of every second that has touched him before; he routinely encounters influences that will produce changes and actions that he cannot begin to predict or understand. And yet to acknowledge the complexity of these causes and motives was not to disallow agency. In that, all men are equal, even the cloistered monk— equally innocent, equally guilty. A man is not wholly responsible for what he becomes, but he is absolutely accountable for who he is.

Henry keeps running, though not so fast as before. His legs have become heavy posts, and his chest feels as though it is about to collapse under its own weight. His heart pounds against his sternum as if it might burst from his chest. Henry begins to worry that he will not make it to Concord, that he will expire right here, alone, and be overtaken by the flames. And then he sees that he is not alone in the woods after all. There is another wanderer ahead, a stout man with a crooked walking stick. Henry drops to one knee; not in supplication, he simply can no longer stand. The stout man approaches, and Henry again makes his breathless plea.

His panting comes in a deafening rush, and he cannot hear himself speak. To his own ears the words sound like choking. But the other man understands; his reply indicates as much.

“A fire, you say?”

The stout man tries to keep an eye on his dog—a spotted hound of some indiscernible origin, the bastard offspring of immigrant dogs. The man looks around for verification of Henry's claim.

“Where is this fire?”

“A mile …” Henry can hardly sacrifice the breath needed for speech. “A mile or so … perhaps more.”

The man whistles for his dog, contemplates the direction Henry indicates.

“You are certain?”

Henry nods emphatically, still kneeling, greedily gulping air, hoping he will not need to run farther. “Yes … yonder … it is a furious beast.”

“Impossible. I was there this morning. There was no fire.”

“Believe me.” Henry pleads between heavy breaths. “It is very large … and moving with great speed.”

“It cannot be,” the man says, though he sounds unconvinced by his own reasoning. “There is, in the direction you indicate, a sizable plot of land belonging to me. And I lit no fire there this morning. Why would any man set fire to trees not his own?”

Henry has neither time nor breath to argue that the converse would appear equally illogical. “We did not intend to do so … we only lit a small fire … but this wind … I am certain it has spread the flames … halfway to Fair Haven Hill by now …”

“Fair Haven Hill? If that's true, it will go to Concord. What kind of fire have you started? Do you mean to burn down the town?”

The stout man calls to his dog, and together the three turn
back in the direction Henry has come, eight legs leaping over roots and vines. The stout man is surprisingly agile, and he lends Henry a supportive arm more than once. They smell it long before they see it. They hear a roar that reminds Henry of the deafening crack of spring ice on Walden Pond, and they feel the rush of heat carried on the wind. The man whose woods are becoming ash mutters as they run.
Lord Almighty! Lord Almighty! When
they reach the first tendrils of smoke exploring the untouched woods they come upon a terrified old man with an ax and an empty sack, hurrying in the opposite direction. His eyes are wide, his face streaked with soot, and his few gray hairs float about his head like cobwebs. He tells them he is a carpenter, come to collect dead wood, but the fire chased him away. He says the blaze is fierce and spreading quickly. He urges them to turn back, and then he runs away.